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What has prevented Walkable Urbanism, and how to fix our cities

For decades, the manuals for street design have been based on American highway engineering, in part based on really poor data and bad models. And that’s even when well-intentioned, things get even worse when you add in ideological agendas. Thanks to John Forester, the manual for road design excluded separated cycling facilities. So no one could build them.

Jeff Tumlin (@jeffreytumlin) does a fantastic job of explaining how all these pieces fit together to give us the system we have today. Highly recommend watching this video, it’s one of the single most influential things that has shaped my understanding of urban planning. How we’ve failed at design. How humans actually behave. It’s the whole package of how motordom created the current reality, and how we can work to make better cities.

Jeff Tumlin has presented in Ottawa, in April 2012. David Reevely enjoyed it.

You actually can’t really fight congestion, Tumlin argued. Or you can, but you’ll lose…. It’s well-established to the point of orthodoxy that once a road fills up, yes, you can widen it, but whatever improvements you see won’t last: you’ll just get more people driving on that fancy new widened road, and before long they’ll be moving at the same slow speed they were before.

You can find an incredibly high-level summary of the planning summit at http://ottawa.ca/planningsummit but no video or presentations. It continues to baffle me that Ottawa brings very good people like Jeff Tumlin and Jan Gehl to speak, but even when video is taken (as it was in both cases) the video is never permanently posted online.